NEW YORK, NY June 16, 2006 —More than 31,000 adults and children slept in a NYC shelter last night. The Bloomberg Administration wants to see that number shrink and so they have been experimenting with a new philosophy - stop homelessness before it begins. For about a year and a half, in poor neighborhoods where homeless rates are high, six prevention programs have been charged with finding struggling families before they lose their housing and enter a shelter. WNYC’s Cindy Rodriguez visited a program in Bushwick, Brooklyn to see how it’s working:

REPORTER: There are telltale signs that appear before a family becomes homeless and 31 year old Steven Murrain fits the most common profile. A family who can’t afford its own apartment moves in with relatives or friends into a home that is almost never big enough for everybody.

MURRAIN: It was hard because I have always been a person that is always been on my own. It was hard sharing an apartment even though that’s my mother and everything but you know I’d like to live have my own place and all that.

REPORTER: Murrain, employed as a full-time security guard didn’t earn enough to move his family into their own place. So he, his wife and his son shared a 2 bedroom apartment with his mother, his sister and his sister’s son – three families living under one roof. This was his living situation for three years until he heard about the prevention program called Home Base from a counselor at his child’s pre-school. In November of last year, he contacted them:

MURRAIN: Basically they told me that I would need an extra income so my wife would have to start working. …right now she’s working as a home attendant and then when I showed them that there was two incomes already they proceeded with my case and helping me out.

REPORTER: One month later, he moved into his own two bedroom apartment located on the second floor of a two family home. Tires are stacked outside Murrain’s front door. He says the landlord is struggling to pay the mortgage and rented out the front yard to an auto shop. He found the place through a realtor that works with Home Base:

MURRAIN: The deposit for the apartment was 24-hundred and the real estate guy gotta get his fee so that’s where Home Base worked it out. They came up with 12-hundred.

REPORTER: He says without the financial help he never would have been able to move in. The rent is 12-hundred dollars a month and Murrain says he and his wife struggle to pay it. The apartment is tidy, the walls are painted light blue and family pictures cover them. We sit on a worn but comfortable couch:

REPORTER / MURRAIN Did you ever think that you would have to go into a homeless shelter? No, because I would definitely try my best to prevent that go into a homeless shelter. Because I’ve heard form other people that have been to a homeless shelter that it’s no fun in the ball park. It’s very hard.

REPORTER: Still, Home Base considers his family of three successfully diverted from entering a homeless shelter and that’s exactly what the city expects the program to do. In the last 18-months Home Base has made contact with 764 families. The Department of Homeless Services says in 2005, 237 families from Bushwick entered the shelter system – that’s down from 305 the previous year.

REPORTER: Bushwick’s program is one of the best in the city. The success of the other five programs varies from showing no drop in the homeless rate at all to double digit improvements. DHS refused to give specific data on them.

REPORTER: Pamela Allred runs Bushwick Home Base. She says the Department of Homeless Services provides monthly data that on who is entering shelters and why:

ALLRED: Many of them are living in a doubled up situation. Part of the outreach is to identify for folks that they be in a housing crisis or be at risk of living in a shelter although they may not self identify with being in a housing crisis

REPORTER: Allred says others signs that a family is heading towards homelessness are tenants living in dilapidated buildings with serious housing violations. The more obvious indicator is eviction papers:

ALLRED: We get a weekly list of all of the residents in Bushwick who are in eviction proceedings…We mail letters to them to let them know that they are in fact in eviction proceedings many of them will not know and let them know we have free legal services available to them if they contact us.

REPORTER: DHS also provides the program with a list of families found ineligible for shelter. These are the data driven ways to identify families, but the harder work is reaching out to the community and finding those that don’t appear on any list. This includes a large immigrant population in Bushwick that is difficult to reach because many are in the country illegally and fear anything government related. Even when contact is made, Allred concedes it’s difficult to help them because they don’t qualify for most services.

REPORTER: Home Base employs different methods to try to find people who may be struggling and on the verge of a housing crisis.

REPORTER: Cindy Cruz and Wendy Agron are outreach workers for Home Base, on a rainy weekday morning they arrive at a neighborhood elementary school to meet a group of about 10 parents, all mothers - who will sit and listen to them explain what Home Base is and what it can do for them or people they know.

REPORTER: Inside a room that looks like a teacher’s lounge, the two begin their pitch. The first thing they do is explain who is at risk of becoming homeless. Cruz gives the women an example:

CRUZ: ….a mother in her middle age who has a daughter who is an adult and who has children and they are all living in one apartment crowded and when the mother decides that she’s tired of her daughter and the kids taking up her space, eating up her food and jumping on her furniture she might just say, you’re not helping out in the household you got to go.

REPORTER: Cruz says their program can pay for the young mom to take a training course that could lead to a job, a paycheck and eventually an apartment of her own. Phlebotomy school or a 2-thousand dollar course for getting a commercial drivers license are some of the suggestions:

CRUZ: If she says my mom is happy that I’m going to school but it doesn’t mean that the light bill is coming in any less we’ll try to work with her so that she doesn’t get kicked out of her mom’s house and she’s working on herself so that in the future she can do for herself.

REPORTER: Given the demographic makeup of Bushwick Brooklyn, finding families in need would seem easy. The median income in the area is below 22-thousand dollars a year, a neighborhood survey found the rate of housing complaints from tenants is three times the city average and census figures show nearly a quarter of Bushwick households have five or more people living in them

REPORTER: At the elementary school, several women say they know someone who could benefit from the program: Jessica Hernandez spent some time in a shelter herself and planned to hand over Home Bases phone number to her sister:

HERNANDEZ: …she is going through a lot of difficult situation right now. So she is living at home and she has a daughter and uh she is trying to finish college and at the same time it’s hard because she has to support her daughter by herself.

REPORTER: The city has invested 12 million dollars in Bushwick’s Home Base program and five others. The amount is miniscule when it’s compared to the more than 4 billion dollars that’s been spent to run the city’s massive shelter system over the last decade. While prevention programs have the potential for great fiscal benefit, there are also human benefits - entering a shelter is a traumatic experience for families, so helping them before they are in crisis may keep a family from falling apart. For wnyc, I’m Cindy Rodriguez